


No Death in Love

by sweet_neverwhere



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Extended Cut, F/M, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-01
Updated: 2012-07-01
Packaged: 2017-11-08 22:56:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/448476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweet_neverwhere/pseuds/sweet_neverwhere
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shepard has her orders. Garrus will always wait for her. Two-shot. Set post game. Extended Cut spoilers. Destroy ending.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> SPOILERS FOR THE EXTENDED CUT DESTROY ENDING.
> 
> Just my little headcanon. I've been needing to do this since like...well, since I finished the game with that bullshit ending. And then the EC came out and while it's not perfect, it's enough for me to work with. I can overlook the plot holes and fill in the gaps myself. So this is just a two-shot of what came after the red explosion, in my head at least :)

They said they had found her in the rubble not far from Anderson's body. They said she was barely clinging on to life, her eyes half-open in a dead stare as she gasped for what little oxygen her crushed lungs could grasp.

But she refused to die.

The man that had found her, a quarian, told a tale of finding the faintest of life signs among the wreckage; of shouting to his colleagues that there was someone alive - someone that could have been Shepard. They had found Anderson's body moments earlier, in the location that they had predicted the Admiral and the Commander would be. They wanted to find her body, to give the woman who saved the galaxy a proper funeral. They never expected to find  _her._ She was barely visible in the debris, her legs crushed from material of the ceiling above. Her right arm was at an impossible angle, her left hand was a mangled mess (and yet still holding onto a burned-out Carnifex). Her armour was burned, parts of it had melted into her skin and the left side of her face bore blackened and burnt skin.

The quarian didn't think she was conscious, even with her eyes open. She never made the move to look at him as he talked to her while his team-mates moved the rubble that was trapping her; no noise, no response, even as she was lifted and her shoulder moved so that she could be carried.

He was talking above her, past her, to a krogan that was saying her was amazed such a small and squishy creature could not only take down the Reapers but survive all that - not to mention for two days. The quarian had glanced down then, wondering aloud how anyone could have that much resolve.

He had almost dropped her when he locked eyes with the frail woman he was carrying. She was staring at him with such an intensity he was in no doubt that she was conscious. And very focussed. He almost missed it when her lips started to move, her breath hissing past as she tried to form words. In the silence of the keeper tunnel, she was still almost impossible to hear. The quarian had dipped his head, his colleagues watching with interest, and the sensitive auditory sensors finally picked out the word she said.

"Orders."

And then, with the faintest ghost of a grin, Shepard had closed her eyes and fallen unconscious.

They said she'd been unconscious ever since.

They had taken her, and Anderson's body, back down to earth via shuttle. Back to London. There, she had been rushed into a repurposed office building, far away from the site of the beam and the battlefield. It was large, concrete, old, and had survived almost completely intact. It had electricity and running water and a lot of rooms of varying size.

It was no longer an office. It was a hospital.

And it was almost full to capacity.

But this was Shepard.  _The_  Shepard. An injured Admiral couldn't move from his private room fast enough. He needn't have rushed so much. She barely saw the inside of that private room for days. The best medical team they could assemble, from all races, operated around the clock. Patching her together, repairing what they could.

Her laundry list of injuries was impressive. Shattered pelvis; fractures in almost every bone in her legs; four broken ribs; shattered right shoulder; necessary amputation of outermost finger of left hand. Third degree burns, torn muscles, ripped ligaments and tendons. Not to mention the bullet wounds. She was a mess. But she was alive.

And she still refused to die.

They had told him that there were times on the operating table when she  _should_  have flatlined. She  _shouldn_ _'_ _t_ have been alive when the team found her on the Citadel. That it  _shouldn_ _'_ _t have been possible_  for there to be Shepard alive, breathing on her own, in a private room. She was under heavy guard, her room was the only one flanked by two heavily-armoured Alliance soldiers. Everyone knew who was in there. No one quite believed it was true.

 _She shouldn_ _'_ _t be alive_ , they said.

 _We don_ _'_ _t understand it_ , one admitted.

 _We don_ _'_ _t think she_ _'_ _ll wake up_ , added another.

But that wasn't Shepard. It took her two years to wake up again, after she had gone down before. And that was death. She wasn't dead. She was breathing unaided. Her vitals were stable.

In the months it had taken for the  _Normandy_ to be repaired, they had little contact with the galaxy. They weren't even sure if there  _was_  much of a galaxy anymore. But then an Asari cruiser hailed them, telling them everything. And then the captain said  _she was alive._  And suddenly repairs were going faster. Even the agonisingly slow trip back to Sol wasn't quite so bleak when there was a bright light at the end of the tunnel.

And when the  _Normandy_ crew stepped out of the transport shuttle they went unnoticed. Just as it should be. They were not the heroes. They left her because they were unable to do more. None of them wanted to do it, but they had to.

But what was strange was how none of the squad wanted to go into her room once the doctors had left them. They all stood outside, as if they were waiting for her to come out to them. Each one of them had a different expression and none of them moved. And Garrus Vakarian didn't know what to make of it. He watched them all in turn, though none looked his way. They were all looking at the door. Remorse, guilt, regret, hurt, shame, confusion, suspicion; all in varying degrees. It was as if this was just a random group of strangers brought in to see a museum exhibit.

Eventually, it was too much for him to bear. With a growled curse that didn't translate (but that a few turian doctors caught and gasped at), he stomped towards the door like an angry krogan. Calmly, peacefully, the door slid open and then slid shut behind him. He didn't now what he was expecting to see, but it wasn't what was waiting for him.

Her legs, hips, and shoulders were still in a tight bandage. Her left hand was still in a wrapping from a recent surgery. But her skin was almost perfect. They had said she was burned, but there was no outward signs of trauma. Then he remembered the heavy skin weaves and how fast she regenerated thanks to her Cerberus upgrades. He was even surprised at how healthy and fit she looked.

If he didn't know better, he would have said she was sleeping. But she had been sleeping now for nearly an earth year. In the same bed. Yet she looked the same as she always had. As much as he loathed Cerberus, he blessed them for the job they did at rebuilding her because without it, she probably wouldn't have been looking no better than a husk.

But she hadn't woken in that time either. And the longer she stayed asleep, the less likely it would be that she would ever come out of it. They had told him this over and over again. But he didn't believe it. That wasn't Shepard.  _His_ Shepard would come through. No matter what.

Heaving a heavy sigh, he all but fell into the chair nearby. Then, deciding that the chair was in no way close enough, he stood and moved it so that he could take her right hand in his left.

"I'm here, Shepard," his voice was hoarse and tired. "Took me a while to get back. Sorry about that." But he wasn't going anywhere now. He wasn't there when she fell asleep - but he damn well was going to be there when she woke up.


	2. Chapter 2

An explosion. Fire. Blackness.

Pain. Pressure. Hard to breath.

A face. No, a mask. Quarian. Words she could barely understand. Questions about how she had survived. About  _why_ she had survived.

A memory then, words echoing in her head.  _Come back alive_ , they said.  _I love you too_ , was the echo. She had found her voice then. Through the pain of raw vocal chords; of lungs blackened by smoke; of broken ribs. One word. "Orders," spoke with a smile. Pained and painful.

And then there was blackness once more.

She was lost in an empty void, wandering in the darkness unsure if she was actually moving. She couldn't tell which way was up, or even if there was an up. It was never completely silent. There was always some kind of background drone. Sometimes it was a low hum, like the  _Normandy_ _'_ _s_ engine, or her fish tank. Other times it was a faint but steady beep and the occasional whirr of a machine.

And occasionally there were voices.

There had always been voices, especially in her dreams. Her nightmares. But those were sinister whispers, a low hissing sound in the forest she couldn't escape. And the voices of the dead. They were silent now; all gone. No more was there a dark edge to the voices. It was a calming murmur. Like the chatter overheard on the Citadel. Not loud enough for words to be made out, but loud enough to be recognised as voices. Of all races, it sounded.

Occasionally there was a clatter, somewhere far away. Or a shout of alarm. There was the distinct sound of someone crying once. But nothing she could make out. No words that had meaning, no sounds that could help her make sense of the complete and utter darkness surrounding her. No direction. She couldn't even see her own hands.

But she knew they were there, somewhere. There were sensations. Pain, numbness, pins and needles. The same with her feet. But nothing that gave any bearing in the darkness. Her hand could be a foot away from her face or a mile away in some random direction.

Was this death? No. It couldn't be. It wasn't like this before. Before, it had just felt like falling asleep for a few weeks and waking up with one hell of a hangover. There were none of these sensations. But she just wished that she could feel something other than the nothing. The feeling of falling. Or floating. Anything to give her an idea of where she was. But there was nothing. Just those distant noises and feelings that meant nothing.

But she felt surprisingly emotionless about it. She  _should_ have felt something. Confusion, perhaps. Frustration. Fear. But there was nothing, just like there was nothing around her. She was as passive as the darkness. Even this didn't bother her. She didn't even know her name anymore. Or what she was.

And it lasted for an eternity. An eternity in a moment.

Until there was something that sent a ripple through the darkness. A smell. The scent of pine and wood smoke with a faint metallic tang. Of gun oil and solvent. A smell that brought back a memory. An emotion. Her fingers remembered his skin. Her tongue remembered his taste. Her body remembered him. And she began to remember herself. She felt her fingers twitch as they longed to touch; her tongue itched as it longed to whisper his name into the darkness. And out of the background voices, she strained to hear him. She wanted to pick him out of the gloom and have him shine as a beacon.

But there was nothing.

Perhaps there was something there, just beyond her hearing, but she was unable to locate it. And her feelings, her memories, began to fade as a whole new emotion surfaced. Despair. And logic said that any emotion was better than the nothing she felt before, but there was no room for logic here. There was just pain and loss and longing.

"Shepard."

A voice had risen from the darkness like a banshee and sent her spinning off into oblivion. Soft and gentle and terribly, terribly afraid. And that word. Shepard. That was her name wasn't it? She was Shepard. Commander Eden Shepard of the Alliance. N7. Engineer. Daughter. Officer. Lover. Friend. Had she truly forgotten that? Was that why she was drifting as she was, in a sea of nothing?

"When I said to come back alive, I didn't mean like this."

Orders. She had orders. She had taken orders from her subordinate simply because they were given by  _him._ And she had known that no Reaper would ever stop her from fulfilling those orders. Because they were  _his orders._  And she was a damn good soldier. And they were damn good orders. And once upon a time, she was determined. She remembered that, then wondered when and why she had stopped. You don't abandon your mission because your tired or you hurt. Your work is never done when the mission is not complete. She had failed missions, but she had never abandoned one.

And she would not abandon this one. Nor would she fail.

* * *

The first thing she became aware of was the steady beeping of a machine over to her right, followed by how heavy she felt. Where she had been weightless before, she now felt pressed into the soft bed by her own comforting body mass. It was so different to the last time she had felt her own weight, when it was pressed under rubble and resting on a broken shoulder. She felt the air in her lungs, clear and cool and smelling faintly of antiseptic. Gone was the burning, acrid smoke and the pain of broken ribs. Gone was the stench of burning bodies and disintegrated Citadel.

She couldn't open her eyes yet, but she felt she didn't want to. She just wanted to enjoy the feeling of having her own body back.

Tentatively, experimentally, she twitched every individual muscle she could. The thighs and calves of of both legs, followed by flexing of her bare toes. All ten accounted for there. She clenched and unclenched her buttocks and core muscles, twitching her abdominals as if she were about to sit up. Pectorals and shoulders were stiff but mobile, as were biceps. Finger by finger, she counted. To nine. She found herself frowning (noting that her facial muscles worked as she did so) and counted again.  _Nine._ She either couldn't move or was missing her little finger of her left hand. Missing was most likely, as the memory of the pain echoed in the back of her skull.

She also noticed that her right hand felt very heavy. Far heavier than her left. As if something was on it.

Her fingers twitched against something rough yet smooth, like a leather glove. It took a few moments before her brain connected to what it could be and on instinct she turned her palm over and gently locked five fingers with three.

It took a great deal of strength but she finally unglued her eyes from where they had stuck together. And then she immediately closed them again as a sterile white light flooded her and caused red dots on the backs of her eyelids. She cracked them open slowly, letting herself go from incomprehensible blackness into the brilliant lights of her hospital room. Not typical of a hospital room, she noticed. Cracked walls, the occasional bullet hole. Small window showing fluffy white clouds on a pale blue sky. She was on Earth then. Or perhaps a hospital ship with holographic windows. No…concrete walls. This was a planet.

Eventually, after staring at the ceiling for a while, she let her gaze drift down to where a familiar hand lay interwoven with her own. It's owner hadn't seemed to notice. A faint smile tugged at one side of her lips as she followed the line of the arm up until the rested on the face of a very familiar turian.

Or rather, the top of said turian's head. He was slumped forward in the chair, dressed in what looked like cheap casual attire. His posture screamed exhaustion but his breathing whispered peace. And Shepard felt her smile turn fond as she watched him sleep. He had come back. He had waited. No visor, she noticed. It was sitting upside down on the small table nearby, still glowing blue and scrolling through readouts. She'd seen that before, in the captains cabin back on the _Normandy_. When exhaustion (or passion) had overcome them, he would just take it off and discard it on the nearest stable surface.

With great effort, she lifted his hand to her lips and planted a kiss on the soft skin between his fingers. This simple movement caused him to twitch and as she gently lowered their hands again, she noticed the movement in his brow plates that told her he was waking. His mandibles twitched and drooped as he yawned, tired blue eyes finally meeting hers. And then he froze mid-yawn, causing Shepard to involuntarily smirk.

"Shepard?" It was barely a whisper, his eyes drilling into hers with so much emotion that it was suddenly very hard for her to breath. She had only seen that look once before, in very different circumstances. Before the beam and the Catalyst. Back when she had ordered James to take him. Back when she didn't know if she would ever see him again.

"Hey." Even her voice felt heavy, coming out in a slow exhale as it did. He was already moving, sitting on the bed, leaning over her and holding her hand as if she was going to vanish into smoke. "You look tired."

He barked out a breathy laugh that sounded far more like relief than anything else. "You don't look too awake yourself."

"Mmm. I don't think I am yet. Not completely." Her thumb made light circles on the back of his hand and he watched it as if he wasn't sure this was real. As if this was a dream born from exhaustion and he would wake up to find her still asleep. Shepard herself wasn't too sure of it either. "How long was I out?"

"Hard to say. I'd put it at around thirteen earth months."

"Damn. Guess all those sleepless nights finally caught up with me."

Garrus didn't respond. Instead his forehead was pressed to hers with his eyes squeezed shut. She could feel the relief washing off him, feel the tension just slipping out of his almost rigid frame as he affirmed that this was no dream. "They said you wouldn't wake up, Shepard."

The pain in his barely-whispered confession broke her heart and she summoned the energy to lift her still bandaged left hand so she could rest it on the back of his neck, the tips of her exposed fingers rubbing small circles under his fringe. "They also said the Reapers couldn't be stopped."

"I don't think that's quite the same thing."

"Is it not?" She pushed lifted their still joined hands and pushed him back so she could look into his eyes. "I was given orders to stop the Reapers. I did." A pause, a heartbeat. "I was also given an order more important than that one."

Garrus merely looked puzzled. For someone so clever, she thought, he could be exceedingly dense sometimes.

"An order to come back alive."

"Whoever gave you that order was either very smart or utterly crazy."

"I think perhaps both. But it was a good one."

"I can't argue with that."

Shepard let him lean back into her, enjoying the simple pressure of him being there. Allowing him to chase away the darkness and the lingering feeling of  _nothing_ she had been swimming in for far too long. At the same time, she knew that the simple act of their gentle embrace was soothing away his fears that she'd never return to him. The thought that he would continue to wait by her bedside until her body gave out was too painful to comprehend. No. There was no way she could ever have not gone through with those orders. There was no way she could ever leave him again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading :)


End file.
